Where I Became a Film Lover: My Local Public Library

The Upcoming Oscars Are Bringing Back Memories

For years, I have had mixed feelings about the Academy Awards, which this year are coming up on Sunday, March 10. On the one hand, I have enjoyed witnessing artists that I have admired receive recognition for their hard work. On the other hand, the Oscars have a deep bias. When I was younger and less aware about the world, I already knew that the awarding of the Oscars depended heavily on studio campaigns and pandering to the specific tastes of the Academy. The term “Oscar bait” came into my awareness ever since I started reading entertainment magazines in my tween years. Much more seriously and upsetting is the racial bias underpinning who gets nominated, which has been exposed by the #OscarsSoWhite campaign that began a few years ago, the hashtag first being used by April Reign, managing editor for BroadwayBlack.com. I remember being in college at the time, and I wrote an op-ed in my school newspaper commending the movement and criticizing the Academy for its failures. I believe more work needs to be done for the Oscars to be more inclusive and recognize artists of all backgrounds. A few years is not enough to dismantle a deeply entrenched system.

I will therefore not be watching the Oscars. I will probably just read updates, and I will feel happy for the winners.

However, thinking about the ceremony coming this weekend has brought up a pleasant memory.

I believe the year was 2007 or 2008. My local public library had a contest in which the contestants who could accurately predict the winners of a few major awards for the Oscars that year would win a month of DVD rentals for free. Even though the rental fees each week were affordable (much, much cheaper than the fees at a Blockbuster), I still wanted to have fun and participate. I filled out a sheet of my predictions, forgot about it, and then during the next time my mom brought me and my siblings to the library, I found out I was one of the winners.

It’s a happy memory, and it has inspired me to write a tribute to the place that made me a lover of film.

This was a time before streaming. This was when cable was much less common. This was back when Netflix was known for mailing DVDs to customers’ houses and when many towns had small local video rental shops, or maybe a Hollywood Video or a Blockbuster. Movie ticket prices were much more affordable back then, but when we wanted to watch films that were not the most recent releases, we had to find them without the Internet. To watch the classics, we had to borrow them from friends and family, or rent them from a shop, or even buy new copies ourselves if we were building our own collections. 

My siblings and I found old movies at our local public library. This is the same place that fostered a love of reading within us. I remember picking up the neon-colored, worn-with-love entries from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, such as Attack of the Mutant and Phantom of the Auditorium. I delighted in reading Marc Brown’s Arthur Chapter Books, spending time in Elwood City with my favorite fictional school kids when they weren’t on TV. The local public library had a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, with many short volumes containing just two or three stories. This was how I read my first Holmes mystery, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”

This same love and curiosity and wonder I felt browsing and picking up books blossomed in me as I looked through the collection of DVDs at the library.

During middle school, every Friday after classes had ended, our mom would bring me and my siblings to the library to borrow movies for the weekend. The drive between school and the library was less than five minutes. This was before the hectic schedules of high school ruined the weekends of my siblings and friends, so we actually had time to watch movies. We would look through the shelves, and because they were so affordable, we could pick out a few. And just as the stacks of books made me a reader, the shelves of DVDs made me a film lover. 

This is where I discovered films that my mom loved. I trace my love of film through her to my maternal grandfather, who went to the movies and brought rentals home to my mom in Pakistan during her childhood. He loved films made in South Asia and Hollywood. His favorite actor was James Stewart. At the library, I also dove into the works of filmmakers who are among my favorite artists today. The library was where I borrowed some of Steven Spielberg’s films, including Catch Me if You Can and Saving Private Ryan. This was where I became an M. Night Shyamalan fan. I remember holding the worn DVD copy of Signs on the drive home, filled with trepidation and excitement as I wondered how I would handle the spookiness that awaited me. The library was where I discovered Martin Scorsese, watching borrowed copies of The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Raging Bull, and The Departed. This is where I also discovered Guillermo del Toro after renting The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. I borrowed and watched classics that I still think about often, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira.

Libraries undoubtedly serve a public good by allowing art to be accessible. Too often, film is seen as “less” than literature, and one idea I hope to keep affirming in these discussions is that film and literature are different. One isn’t better than the other; each medium has its possibilities and limitations. I am grateful that the library so close to the home I grew up in had a solid collection of movies that opened my eyes to the world of cinema. I know for a fact that, had it not been for the library, my love of film would not be as deep and full of passion as it is today.

I hope more libraries have wide and accessible film selections along with their stacks of books. Both art forms should be shared with as many people as possible. My heart feels a pang of pain when I hear about a library closing or losing funding. Libraries are essential institutions that governments need to fund properly. Knowledge should be available to anyone and everyone who wants it. 

The Internet cannot replace libraries. There are not enough safeguards on some of the most popular websites against misinformation. Furthermore, there has been a recent trend amongst film fans to support the sale of physical media because of the impermanent nature of the Internet. A company can make its films unavailable to stream on a whim. More and more, they have been acting just short of this move by locking movies behind their own subscription streaming services. 

I remember this same push for physical media amongst book lovers back when ebooks first gained widespread popularity. I like ebooks. But, I can’t give away my personal ebooks to people I care about. One of my greatest joys is handing a book I love to someone close to me, so that they can also experience the wonder that I did. There’s also something magical to a used book, with its weight of history, its pages holding traces of all the hands that have held it.

Again, one is not superior to the other. Digital and physical should co-exist. And for physical media, like books, DVDs, VHSs, cassette tapes, and CDs, we need houses to store, preserve, and share them. We need libraries. 

I can’t remember the last time I went to my local library. I think part of me never wants to because part of me wants to preserve the magical place from my childhood inside my head. I dread the possibilities that the DVDs are gone, or that they are much more expensive to rent. Maybe I have nothing to worry about because when I visit, the movie section will be even cooler and more magical, with a broader selection of titles. That was one limitation during the childhood visits: the fact that the selection, though surprisingly vast, was not as big as the selection one would find at a dedicated movie rental store. Furthermore, because there was only one copy of each film, you were out of luck if your desired film was being borrowed already. And also, an issue that only emerged once or twice was the fact that my family would have trouble playing the movie due to a scratch on the disc. The fact that this issue was so infrequent is a testament to how well-preserved the discs were, no doubt due to the love for the films us borrowers felt. 

The best case scenario is that the library today has enough funding to allow people to borrow movies from a massive selection with multiple copies at no extra cost, just as the policy has been for books. 

Things change. They always do. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. 

I will let this tribute here be a humble plaque of remembrance for a place that meant a lot to me when I was a child, a place that made my life better, a place that made a lot of people’s lives better. I hope it’s still there, in some way.